Commentary
The Outlook’s “Trajectories of Hope” Webinar: I had hoped for more
By Carmen Fowler LaBerge, The Layman, December 13, 2011
In the spirit of listening to the voices of people from a variety of perspectives on the issues facing the Presbyterian Church USA, I participated in a webinar presented by The Outlook’s Jack Haberer called “What’s to become of our church…Trajectories of Hope.”
The Outlook is the publication of the The Presbyterian Outlook Foundation whose purpose is in part to “promote free and independent discussion of issues confronting the PCUSA,” and to “insure the survival of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) as a vital Christian community.” Jack Haberer is the Outlook’s editor. He espouses a personal evangelical faith, served as the President of Presbyterians for Renewal and a member of the denomination’s Peace, Unity and Purity Task Force whose report PFR and other renewal groups opposed.
I appreciated Haberer’s clear articulation of his personal convictions as well as his straight forward answer to questions posed at the conclusion of the webinar. It was clear that he hopes there are ways yet to be found to prevent the denomination from further fracturing. He advocates that those who are determined to leave should be allowed to do so. But he offers little encouragement other than “wait” to those whose congregational houses are literally divided by the denomination’s departures from the historic Christian faith.
Haberer likened the denomination to a university, a hospital, a supermarket and an open book. Making the case that Presbyterians never think that everything that can be known is known, Haberer celebrated that the PCUSA is a place where a multiplicity of options allow for folks to shop the faith according to their personal preferences. Being an open book means that we hang our dirty laundry out for everyone to see and scrutinize. However interesting those analogies may be, they minimize the deep theological fissures with which we are struggling.
People are not leaving and congregations are not agreeing to pay huge ransoms for their own freedom because they dislike a faculty member (aka denominational official) or they don’t want to deal with messy people or because they don’t like the brand of curriculum being served up. Some people may be leaving out of embarrassment that the dirty laundry is hanging out for everyone to see, but shaming them about it doesn’t hold much hope for keeping them in. What the webinar missed is that individuals and congregations are struggling with core, essential, non-negotiable issues.
Haberer acknowledged that the denomination has no list of essentials and he seemed to suggest that the making of such a list was tantamount to autocracy. Instead of seeing maximal uniformity and minimal uniformity as two poles between which lie a spectrum of reasonable faith expressions, Haberer acted as if these were the only two options in a forced choice world.
As the author of GodViews, Haberer knows better than that. He knows that Presbyterians hold views across a spectrum and only some live at the most strident opposing poles. Is there nothing on which we can agree in terms of propositional faith? Even if our list of essentials began and ended with an affirmation of the fully eternal, fully human, fully divine nature of Jesus; the full sufficiency of his atoning work upon the cross for the forgiveness of sins; the bodily resurrection of Christ from death to life, His ascension into Heaven and the reality that He is coming again to judge all humankind, could we not at least agree on that? According to the Outlook’s webinar, to suggest anything specific is to limit the minimal uniformity position the PCUSA has taken. Which, ultimately, leads to the opposite pole: maximal uniformity to the position which holds that nothing is essential except the freedom to believe anything without bounds.
According to the webinar, diversity and unlimited freedom are what is essential in the common life of the PCUSA. Whatever essential one person or group may hold, the one we must all hold is that others may hold diametrically opposed essential views and be equally Presbyterian. Haberer said if that causes you angst, “get over it.”There’s little hope that people are simply going to “get over” the chasms dividing them in the PCUSA. People are not going to “get over” the fact that others within the denomination deny the divinity of Jesus. They are not going to just “get over” the fact that the Bible is not regarded as the Word of God nor is Jesus seen as essential to salvation. And they can’t “get over” a hurdle that literally bars them from believing something the Bible clearly articulates in order to accommodate the personal proclivities of others who do not believe that the Bible means what it says. These are, in fact, not signs of hope.
The other thing that troubled me throughout the webinar was the continual reference to the PCUSA as a church. The PCUSA is a human institution, conceived of by churches who wanted to do together what they could not do separately. The PCUSA is not itself a church. To liken the commitment of Jesus to the church of Corinth or Laodicea or Philippi to the PCUSA is not the theology espoused in our Confessions. Equating the PCUSA with a church or the Church is not a hope-promoting ecclesiology.
Haberer did make interesting advocacy of the formation of church orders, using the Roman Catholic Church as a model. The idea is that everyone remains within the PCUSA but differentiates within by aligning with others of like-mind and/or ministry passion. One assumes that if these orders were formed by and for people of similar theological convictions, some orders within the PCUSA would adopt standards that would be more stringent than the current Book of Order contains. Would that be allowed? And how would that affect the already miry process of the transfer of pastors from one presbytery to another? If a pastor is a member of Order A but is called to pastor a church in a presbytery dominated by members of Order B, how likely is that presbytery to receive that pastor? If churches themselves affiliate with such orders, will they be free to support their order to the exclusion of support for the denomination? How long could that persist until the system itself is crushed by its own weight?
Haberer did admit that if the current liberty to ordain ever became a mandate or if the issue were ever “Kenyonized” that would be “a game changer.”
What Haberer is missing is that the game has already changed. At a very fundamental level, the PCUSA is not what she used to be. Her seminaries are not what they used to be. Her pastors are not what they used to be. Her members are not what they used to be. Her influence is not what it used to be. The question of the webinar remains, what is the hope for her future?
A few options were proffered:
- the maturing of missional theology evidenced by Princeton Seminary’s creation of a chair
- the GAMC’s Engage initiative
- the GAMC’s 1001 new communities of faith initiative
- the Vital Churches Institute Acts 16:5 initiative
Surely there are other signs and trajectories of hope in a denomination that boasts 10,000 outposts that the webinar presenter sees as universities, hospitals and supermarkets.
If we’re a university:
- Who is being educated and how are they being equipped with the Word of God for every good work that God has prepared in advance for them to do?
- What is the outward evidence that the PCUSA is moving folks systematically along an ever more rigorous course whereby minds are transformed by the Word of God, lives brought into fuller conformity with the holiness of Christ and the world blessed?
- Where is the curricul
um of spiritual disciplines, effective witness and ministry that bears fruit 100 fold? - How long would a real university survive with the kind of drop-out rate we have in the PCUSA?
If we’re a hospital:
- Who is being healed and transformed?
- If a person arrives at the hospital and knows they’re sick, what use is it for a credentialed doctor to assure them that nothing ails them?
- Or worse, a sanitarium where people dressed up in the role of doctors are really unhealed, deluded patients themselves.
- People suffering from paralysis produced by sin need the Savior. He alone is their hope. We’ve got nothing to offer if we’re not authentically offering them a relationship with the Great Physician.
If we’re a supermarket:
- Who is being fed and what is the quality of the food we’re feeding God’s precious sheep?
God’s little lambs in the PCUSA are wandering around hopeless, lost, wounded, afraid and dying. Many of their minds and bellies are filled with the dust of secular humanism instead of the Word of God. Others who know they are sin-sick are told that there is nothing wrong with them. Still others are fed spiritual drive-through fast food that does not promote the body’s growth in building itself up in love.
I appreciate the effort The Outlook and Jack Haberer made. But admittedly, I had hoped for more in forecasting the trajectories of hope for our beleaguered denomination. We’re like a university with beautiful ivory towers but no students; a hospital where no one gets better because we’ve determined that everyone is universally well; a supermarket where the fruit of Spirit is picked over and the meat by-passed for lactose-free powered milk that won’t upset anyone’s stomach but neither does it lead to maturity. And as far as being an open book, our laundry has been hanging out for longer than our neighbors care to see.
As I see it, we have but one hope and His name is Jesus. The trajectories of hope are then:
- a return to a unified declaration that Jesus Christ alone is the way to salvation;
- a resurgence of evangelistic fervor to convert the lost;
- a rediscovery of the Bible and a renewal as in the days of Josiah;
- a repentance of our departure from and active participation in the suppression of the Truth; and
- a recommitment to a pattern of discipleship that produces people mature to the stature of Christ who are able to speak the truth in love to a generation of itchy ears.